The All-Sports Ministry of PA NJ & DE - Executive Summary Start-Up Budget & Prospectus

CIRCLE Working Paper 44: February 2006
Sports, Youth and Character: A Critical Survey
is an injustice. How, then, does she request
– or demand – more playing time without being
disruptive? Does she endure quietly, redoubling
her efforts in practice to prove her worth as a
starter – or does she slack off, since more effort
doesn’t seem to pay off? How assertive should
she be, how submissive? For a young athlete in
her early or mid-teens, these are complicated and
vexing matters to work out.
Even if she succeeds at seeing matters through
the coach’s eyes, the player may still experience
mental turmoil. Her sense of what’s best for
the team may conflict with the coach’s policies.
Perhaps the coach, in her view, allows too much
negative chatter during practice – chatter in which
teammates grouse at one another about failures
to make a timely pass or execute a throw to the
right base, chatter that carries over into games as
well. Perhaps the coach seldom takes starters out
of a game when they make mistakes but pulls the
trigger quickly on substitutes when they commit
errors. In these ways, so the player thinks, the
coach is hurting team morale. But it is not her
place to tell the coach his business, is it? So how
does she make her views known? Does she talk
covertly to other players about her concerns? Does
she urge her parents to speak to the coach? Or
does she urge them not to intervene, though they
share her concerns?
Further complications offer themselves. For
example, the good feelings a player has for her
team may wash away under the stress of a losing
season. She may begin to think she is wasting
her talent on the team and should go elsewhere
– but how does that honor solidarity, a value
she’s been vocally defending in past seasons? Is
it morally better to stick with the team although
a return to winning ways seems remote? Isn’t
it selfish to seek a better deal for oneself at the
team’s expense? On the other hand, how much
self-sacrifice must a player make for the sake of
loyalty? When does altruism cease to be admirable
and become foolish? (Or, to vary the example,
suppose the coach decides to let go a handful of
players who’ve been stalwart contributors from
the club’s beginnings but don’t have the skills
needed now that the club has climbed to the
highest levels of competition. Isn’t it unacceptable
to reward the dedication of this handful with such
ruthless dismissal? Is winning such a valuable
goal to warrant tossing aside considerations of
past contribution? On the other hand, the team
originally set for itself high goals. Does it now
brush these goals aside for the sake of communal
bonds? Whether a player is one of those dismissed
or one of those retained, she has much to consider,
many points of view to reconcile.)
These are typical of the challenges – characterbuilding
or character-deforming – that a player
confronts every season, every game, every
practice. She may resolve them in ways she
regrets in hindsight, or in ways she builds upon as
her sense of value matures, or in ways that pass
quickly into the trash bin of forgotten episodes in
her life. She may find her resolutions instructive in
other dimensions of her life – in school, in personal
relationships, in family affairs – as she recapitulates
them in new circumstances or acts consciously to
avoid following their lead.
However, the main effects of her reflections and
choices as a player may actually lie dormant for
a long time, coming into sharp relief only as she
becomes a parent herself and watches her own
child take up a sport. What she imparts to her
child-athlete – by specific instruction or silent
observation – may carry the distinctive stamp
of experience forged on another playing field at
another time.
Sports participation truly involves “many
intertwined and interwoven threads of influences,
subtle and not always easy to analyze.” The
challenge ahead for students of sport is to find
effective ways to capture accurately these “threads
of influence” and to generalize about them. This is
a challenge we are a long way from meeting.
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